The starlight energy crackled between Sophia's fingers as she launched herself at Raven with a ferocious speed. Each step she took echoed like a detonation in the air, as if the world itself trembled before her fury. The tip of her foot slid against the ground before she propelled herself into a violent leap. A spear of light erupted from her palm, crashing into Raven's face… or at least, that's what she aimed for.
He deflected it with one hand, barely turning his neck. A palm strike diagonally hit Sophia's wrist, deflecting her arm, but she twisted her body with deadly grace and, with her leg extended, kicked him square in the chest. The impact made the air shudder. Raven slid several meters back, his boots carving grooves in the cracked stones of the coliseum.
"What did you do to Jake!?" Sophia spat, panting, her eyes blazing with fury. "Why did you hit him like that, you bastard!?"
"Because he needed to wake up," Raven replied with unnerving calm. "Sometimes, pain is the only bridge between fantasy and reality."
Sophia frowned. She gritted her teeth as a vibrating sphere formed in her hand, spinning with sharp filaments. Her breath sounded like the hum of contained thunder. She surged forward again.
The clash between them was an explosion. Knee against forearm. Elbow against collarbone. Energy against energy.
Raven lunged with his fingers like claws, gripping Sophia's shoulder, attempting to slam her to the ground. But she spun like a glowing serpent, breaking free in mid-air and landing an upward kick to his chin, forcing his head back toward the sky.
"Where were you the three days before the tournament?!" Sophia shouted, her voice cracking with something more than just rage.
Raven stopped.
Just for a fraction of a second. Enough.
"It doesn't matter," he murmured. But his eyes—those pale, almost inhuman eyes—flickered. His lower lip trembled with a barely perceptible grimace.
And for Sophia, that was more than enough.
"Zephyr…!" she whispered, as if her soul had been drained. "Did you have contact with him?! What did he do to you?!"
Raven's expression hardened. He charged at her with renewed violence, as if Zephyr's very name had burned him from within. His hands enveloped in dark, glowing smoke—concentrated abyssal energy, swirling like a ravenous vortex. His fist shattered Sophia's defense, one, two, three times.
She spat blood but kept fighting.
"He corrupted you! I know it! I was with you when you wanted to protect everyone! You weren't like this!"
"And what do you know about what I was?" Raven growled, his voice distorted, as if speaking through a second hidden throat behind his flesh. "You don't understand what's out there… what's beneath."
He darted around her with inhuman speed, leaving trails of darkness in his wake, like cracks in reality. He struck Sophia in the abdomen, then in the jaw, and a knee to her back sent her crashing to her knees. But she rose again, wrapped in a glowing, trembling aura, her face streaked with dirt and blood.
"Beneath what?" she spat. "Fear? Your own cowardice? The power they promised you in exchange for destroying everything you were?"
Raven raised his hand. The abyssal energy began to cloak him like a burning black layer, glowing roots emerging from his wrists like living veins. His mask was broken in half, revealing part of his face: one eye filled with rage, the other… the other cried without tears.
"Shut up," he whispered.
Sophia lunged again, with more rage than before, more pain than anger. And as the battle raged on, with every strike, every millimeter-perfect dodge, every stifled scream and every flash of light or shadow, something more than their bodies was slowly unraveling: their friendship was unraveling, the history they shared was unraveling, the innocence of what they once believed they were was breaking.
And at the end of that battle fragment, both drenched in wounds and memories that hurt more than broken bones, Sophia understood something: Raven hadn't just been corrupted by Zephyr.
He had chosen to fall.